


One Hundred Percent John Sheppard

by coolbreeze1



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-25
Updated: 2011-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolbreeze1/pseuds/coolbreeze1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag to "Conversion"</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Hundred Percent John Sheppard

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to everybetty for the beta!

Teyla was standing behind her young Athosian pupil, their arms locked as she finished demonstrating the disarming maneuver, when the doors to the gym slid open with a hiss and John stepped into the room.

“Colonel!” she exclaimed, surprised to see him dressed and walking around. She released the young girl she’d been training with, bid her farewell and then turned back to her team leader. “Should you be up and about?”

“Hey, I’ve been cooped up in that damned infirmary for a couple of weeks. Give me a break,” he answered with a smile. He walked toward her, stooping to pick up the extra bantos rods she had left on the bench near her bag.

Teyla studied him. He was still pale, but he was up and moving around—a far cry from the mutated version she’d spent long hours sitting vigil with over the last few weeks.

“You are looking well. Are you feeling more like yourself?”

John swung the sticks in his hands in a tight circle, the movement slow and measured, before glancing up at her with a grin. “Well, according to my DNA, I’m 100 percent John Sheppard again.” He paused, twisting his right arm around. “Although, I’ve got to say, I’m looking forward to getting rid of this thing one day.”

Teyla followed his gaze, and her eyes widened at the sight of the rough, greenish-gray patch of scaly skin. A blue substance looked liked it had bubbled up from his veins, and she stifled a grimace at the hardened scar.

“Doc says it’ll clear up eventually,” John mumbled. As he glanced up, he caught her staring and quickly turned away, dropping his arm. Teyla forced herself to look back at him. He was shifting awkwardly, looking like he wanted to say something else, so she waited.

“Ah, so listen,” he started, clearing his throat. “While I’ve been laying there the past few weeks, I’ve been remembering things…”

The memory of the last time they’d been in the gym together flashed through her mind and Teyla felt trepidation creeping up on her. John’s discomfort was expanding and she was tempted to interrupt him.

“Some things I might have done that you could call _out of character_.”

“You mean when you attacked the security detail?” she asked with a smile, deflecting what she knew he was trying to say.

John looked up at her, a sheepish grin flitting across his face. “That was one of them.” He paused again, taking a deep breath. “There’s another thing I should probably apologize for.”

He shifted awkwardly again, a faint rosy tint coloring his cheeks. Teyla shook her head. He had gone through enough in the last few weeks, and he should not have to apologize for things he had done while sick.

“Give it no further thought,” she said.

John’s head jerked up, the relief on his face palpable. The tension in his shoulders relaxed visibly, and he swung the bantos rod a little more fluidly in his hand. “Good, I won’t.”

Teyla smiled. “It is nice to have you back… _John_.”

She turned and walked toward the door, and as she exited, she sighed in relief, hearing John’s own relieved huff echoing behind her.

ooooooooooooooooooo

An errant swing of a bantos rod two weeks later sent Teyla to the infirmary seeking out a packet of extra-strength Tylenol, but once there, she almost didn’t see John lying stretched out under the Ancient scanner. It was only while the nurse was probing the small bump on the side of her head that she happened to glance in that direction just as John sat up and swung his legs over the side, his back to them.

“Is that Colonel Sheppard?” she asked, already trying to move around the nurse.

The woman glanced over her shoulder and nodded. “Yes, I believe so.”

“Is he sick?”

It had been less than a month ago that Elizabeth had come to them and told them it was time to say goodbye to him, and the image of John as a half-mutated creature still haunted her nightmares. While he’d been released from the infirmary two weeks prior, and despite his physical appearance, she knew he was still recovering. He never admitted it, but she had noticed how early he went to bed, how late he slept in the morning, how tired he grew during sparring sessions already cut short. He was getting better and stronger, but he wasn’t there yet.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him,” the nurse replied. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll get your Tylenol for you. There’s no sign of a concussion but you may want to duck next time.”

The nurse seemed nice enough—a new arrival off the Daedalus’s last run—and Teyla smiled in response to the lighthearted comment, but her attention was focused on John. He was still sitting on the scanner, his shoulders slumped forward and his posture screaming fatigue.

Or perhaps trepidation. Had something caused the Iratus retrovirus infection to return? The doctor’s gene therapy treatment had been a last-minute miracle, and she felt a sudden clench of fear race through her that perhaps the treatment had only been temporarily effective. She was about to call out to him when her nurse returned, holding out a glass of water and two yellow pills. She swallowed them quickly and slid off the bed, but when Carson suddenly stepped into the room and walked immediately to John’s side, she hesitated. The two men bowed their heads close together as they spoke, and a moment later, Carson grabbed John’s upper arm and eased him off the scanner bed, not letting go as he led him through the back door of the infirmary.

Teyla mumbled a quick thank you to her nurse and dashed after them. It took all of fifteen seconds for her to cross the infirmary, and as she stepped through the doors and rounded the corner, she found herself face to face with Carson. She pulled up sharply, almost stumbling at the abrupt stop.

“Teyla! Are you alright? I saw you come in a few minutes ago.” The doctor had grabbed her arm to steady her after their collision, and he ducked his head down now to look more directly into her eyes.

She forced a smile and a deep, calming breath. “I am fine, Carson, thank you. I saw John. Is he alright?”

“What?” He looked puzzled for half a second before understanding dawned and he shot a quick glance over his shoulder toward the open door of one of the private rooms in the back. “Oh, he’s well enough. You should stop in and say hello. You’re sure you’re fine?”

“It is just a bruise,” she answered absently. She narrowed her eyes, hearing something more behind the doctor’s simple suggestion of greeting a friend, but Carson smiled and moved around her, disappearing back into the main part of the infirmary before she could work out what he wasn’t saying.

She glanced at the door of the room and hesitated, seeing John’s blue, scaly face and hand again. It had been his inhuman yellow eyes that had unnerved her the most—the total lack of recognition in his gaze. But even before he had started to change physically, she’d sensed the changes happening within him. The memory of their sparring match in the gym suddenly slammed into her and she sucked in a deep breath, shaking her head as she pushed those particular events out of her mind.

The urge to flee was strong, but instead, she stepped forward, peering cautiously around the door and relaxing when it was just John—dark spiky hair, normal skin, and familiar green eyes—lying on the single bed in the center of the room. He was staring at the opposite wall, his gaze distant, and she took another step, ensuring her foot slapped against the floor and caught his attention.

His head snapped in her direction, and he started to push himself up from his semi-inclined position. “Oh, hey, Teyla,” he said, and he leaned back against the pillows slowly, looking stiff and uncomfortable. “Thought I heard your voice.”

“John,” Teyla said, smiling. There was a chair next to the bed but she ignored it and walked to his side. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered quickly. He gave her a quick grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“But you are in the infirmary.”

“What?” He shook his head. “No, I’m not—well, yes, I am, but I’m not sick or anything. Beckett is just monitoring the whole mutating-into-a-bug thing.”

“This is just a checkup then?” she asked, feeling her own tension dissipate.

When John didn’t immediately answer, the anxiety snapped back and she felt the throbbing on the side of her head spread to a spot directly behind her eyes.

“Carson’s got me on a schedule with the gene therapy stuff,” he finally answered.

“I do not understand.”

He flipped his arm over, fingering the rough scab that still marred the inside of his forearm. “I have to do the gene therapy for a few more weeks, just until I’m 100 percent John Sheppard.”

Teyla nodded, relaxing a little. “Did you not say you were already 100 percent John Sheppard?”

John looked up at her and grinned, and this time the smile did reach his eyes. “I was rounding up.”

“All set, Colonel?” Carson breezed into the room, interrupting their conversation, a datapad in the crook of his arm. He was followed by two nurses, one with a tray of equipment and one with a stack of blankets.

“Guess so,” John sighed, eyeing the nurse with the tray of equipment. Teyla glanced from one person to the next, evidently catching John’s attention. “I have to do another gene therapy thing tonight,” he explained.

“Just until the last of the retrovirus infection clears up,” Carson added. “I don’t want to take any chances of it making a comeback.”

“This thing,” John said, lifting his arm and tapping the mutated scar.

“That is good to hear.” Teyla felt the tension in her shoulders unwind and her headache move back to a dull throb in the bruise above her ear. “Would you like me to stay?”

“You don’t have to,” John answered quickly.

Too quickly. _Was this what Carson had been trying to tell her in the hallway?_

“I just have to sit here for a few hours, right doc?”

“The IV infusion will take about two to three hours, but I’ve already told you you’re staying the night for observation.”

John let his head flop back onto the pillow and he rolled his eyes. Carson’s heavy, exasperated sigh caused Teyla and both nurses to giggle, and Teyla had to stifle more laughter when John’s face flushed pink.

“Then let’s get this over with,” John huffed, scrunching down in the pillows.

Teyla saw him wince as the nurse started the IV, hanging two separate bags of fluid above him. Carson’s attention was back on the datapad, and he mumbled to himself as he tapped the screen.

John rolled his head toward her. “I appreciate the offer, Teyla, but I don’t think I’ll be very good company tonight. In fact, I was planning on sleeping through most of this anyway.”

“Very well,” Teyla answered. She had the sudden urge to camp out in the chair next to his bed and monitor his condition with her own eyes, but she patted him on the shoulder and stepped back. “I will see you in the morning.”

ooooooooooooooooooo

She didn’t see him in the morning. At lunch, there was still no sign of him. Rodney and Ronon were their normal selves, eating quickly then running off to the lab and the gym, respectively. They were either oblivious to John’s night in the infirmary or knew something she did not. By mid-afternoon, she was worried enough that she stopped by John’s quarters, and when she got no answer there, fear gripped her insides.

She walked as quickly as she could without actually running toward the infirmary, slowed down right before stepping through the doors, and still almost ran into Beckett again.

“Carson!” she yelled. He flinched in surprise, and she felt heat crawl up her neck. “I am sorry,” she said in a much lower tone. “I did not mean to startle you.”

He shrugged, but the smile didn’t quite hide his puzzled look. “Is everything alright?”

“John—is he…I have not seen him today and I wanted to make sure everything went well last night.”

Carson scratched his head, sighing. “He had a bit of a rough night, to be honest,” he answered.

Teyla bit her lip, waiting for him to continue. This was not what she had expected to hear. She’d been worried, yes, but she’d also believed the doctor would tell her everything was fine. That John was fine. He’d looked fine the night before.

“The gene therapy is rough on the system. I should have known to give him the antiemetics right away, but you know the colonel…”

“What?” Teyla asked, interrupting him. Her mind was racing, trying to fill in the blanks. “Is John still here?”

“Sorry, Teyla. I’ve been lost in thought all day. He’s not here; I released him back to his quarters this morning. The gene therapy caused a good deal of nausea and he was up half the night sick from it, but he’s fine now. Worn out, to be sure, but fine.”

“I stopped by his room but he did not answer.”

“I checked on him about an hour ago and he was fighting a losing battle then. I’m sure he’s dead asleep by now.”

Carson made a move toward his office, and Teyla glanced over his shoulder to see his desk piled high with work. “Thank you, Carson. I did not mean to bother you.”

“No bother. John’s lucky to have people checking up on him, even if the daft bugger thinks he can face this all on his own.”

“There will be more treatments?”

“A few more, at least, but they shouldn’t be as bad as last night. The first time he went through this he was unconscious or in a medically induced coma for most of it. _Of course_ the treatment’s going to cause nausea, at the very least…”

His voice trailed off as he wandered back into his office, and Teyla knew his attention was focused on his gene therapy work again. Carson wouldn’t tell her John was fine if he wasn’t, and if he’d been as sick as the doctor had described, then she certainly didn’t want to pull him away from much needed rest.

She wandered through the hallways, lost in thought, and didn’t realize where she was heading until she found herself standing in front of her own door. Thoughts and emotions swirled around her as she stepped inside, but when her gaze went immediately to the candles on her nightstand, she knew what she had to do.

Tonight, she would meditate.

ooooooooooooooooooo

It was two weeks later, to the day, that she remembered John had said something about a schedule of treatments. While they rarely planned official team gatherings, the four of them tended to show up in the mess hall at the same time more often than not. It had happened again that night, and she’d found herself sitting across from John and trying to ignore Rodney and Ronon debating and bargaining over who should get the brownie John was too full to eat.

And yet he’d hardly eaten anything. She watched him stirring his soup endlessly, more than half of it still in the bowl. She leaned forward intent on asking him if he was alright when she saw the flash of a knife out of the corner of her eye.

“Holy Mother of God!” Rodney screeched, shoving the brownie toward Ronon. “You win—eat it.”

“Calm down, McKay,” Ronon said, a grin splitting his face. “I was going to cut the brownie in half.”

“Oh. Fine then, cut away.” Rodney sat back, folding his arms. Until Ronon brought the knife down. Then he leaned forward again, eyes narrowing. “Half, Ronon. Exactly half.”

Teyla rolled her eyes and caught John grinning at her. She smiled back, noticing the genuine amusement in his eyes as well as the dark circles beneath them. She glanced down at the scar she knew was still on his arm, although it was covered now in a long-sleeve t-shirt, but when she looked up again, John had turned away, his focus again on his squabbling teammates.

“I’m pretty sure you can get back in line and get seconds,” he offered.

“I can’t!” Rodney snapped, but his voice was lost under the screech of Ronon’s chair as the big man jogged back toward the dessert line. “The cooks are all under Beckett’s orders not to give me seconds,” the scientist muttered, and then he spotted John’s brownie.

Teyla laughed out loud at the look of pure joy on Rodney’s face as he realized Ronon had left the entire brownie behind. He grabbed it, shoving half of it into his mouth in one bite.

John laughed and stood up. “Well, kids. I’m beat, and I still have some paperwork I wanted to get done tonight.”

He moved quickly, before Ronon returned and Rodney swallowed his mouthful of brownie. Teyla managed to say good-night back, and then he was gone, dumping his half-eaten bowl of soup and disappearing through the door.

“Where’d Sheppard go?” Ronon asked, returning with three more brownies.

“Paperwork,” Rodney answered. He shoved the second half of John’s brownie in his mouth then looked plaintively at Ronon’s three.

Teyla bid them good night as they launched back into their bargaining on how to divide the three brownies, although Rodney’s version was significantly muffled with his mouth full. She dumped her empty tray and walked quickly into the hall, looking for John. She had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t on his way to do paperwork, and now that she thought about it, he’d never actually said that was what he was going to do. Only that he’d _wanted_ to do it—and the day John Sheppard wanted to do paperwork couldn’t be a good thing.

She headed for the infirmary and caught a glimpse of him disappearing through the back door just as she walked through the front one, Carson close on his heels. _Another treatment,_ she guessed. She smiled at one of the nurses and walked toward the back before they could ask her anything. As she turned into the hallway that led to the private rooms, she heard Carson talking and she stopped, wondering if she should have come. But she was already here and to turn away now was…

She shook her head. She didn’t know what it was, but John had almost died a few weeks ago, and despite everyone’s assurances that he was fine, she could not simply forget how close she’d come to losing a friend.

John was in the same room, lying back on the same bed. His long-sleeve t-shirt had been tossed onto the chair and was almost sliding to the floor, and he was pulling a thin blanket up over his scrub top.

“Another treatment?” Teyla asked, standing in the doorway, although she already knew the answer.

John stared at her in shock for a moment, then nodded, and Teyla suddenly felt awkward at her intrusion. She knew John was a private man—extremely private. She should not have barged in on him like this. It was selfish on her part to want to be a part of this; if he’d wanted her to know, he would have said something. Probably.

Probably not, actually, now that she was thinking about it.

“You should be feeling that now,” Carson said, patting John’s shoulder. Teyla saw an empty syringe in his hand as he turned to discard it.

“Yep,” John mumbled, blinking.

“We’ll get started in just a few minutes. It should be much easier this time, Colonel.”

“Yeah…said that already.”

Carson smiled and nodded at Teyla as he slipped out of the room. Teyla hesitated, wondering if she should just wish him good night and take her leave. John sighed, turning to look at her with a head that suddenly seemed too heavy for him to lift.

“I do not mean to intrude,” she started, then stopped when John lifted a hand and waved at her.

“S’okay,” he said. He sighed again, closing his eyes for a few seconds before blinking again and staring up at the ceiling. “This sucks,” he whispered.

Teyla stepped forward, reaching out for his arm. “I know there is little I can say that will make you feel better, but I know Carson is doing everything he can to make this treatment easier than the last.”

John nodded, but he lifted his scarred arm with a frown. “It looks the same.”

“It will not always be there.”

“Yeah, I know. I just want to be… _me_. Back to my old self. Completely.”

“And how much of you is not John Sheppard?” she asked, smiling.

John huffed out a laugh, relaxing a little more in the bed. “Well, I’m now 98.2379 percent John Sheppard so that leaves 1.7621 percent. But they always say that last little bit to lose is the hardest.”

“I have full confidence in your determination.”

John grunted, letting his eyes slide closed, his lips still curled in a slight smile. Moments later, Carson walked back into the room, followed again by two nurses with blankets and IV equipment. They moved quickly, one of them getting John hooked up to two bags of fluids while the other began spreading the blankets over him. He shivered, opening his eyes slightly.

“Here we go, John. Rest if you can—this will be over with before you know it,” Carson said.

John made no reply, his breathing evening out as he settled down. One of the nurses spread another blanket over him, and Teyla felt the warmth emanating from them. Within minutes, John was completely enveloped in the bedding and sound asleep.

“This is already going better,” Carson said. He wrote something down on his datapad with the small stylus then glanced up at Teyla. “Are you staying?”

“For a little while, if I may,” she answered.

“Aye, of course. We’ll be checking on him frequently, but let us know if you or he need anything.”

She nodded as they left the room, then she moved to the chair and scooped up John’s t-shirt, folding it and setting it neatly on the nightstand next to his bed. He shivered, snorting a little as he squirmed in the bed, and she froze, but he settled almost immediately. She continued to watch him, studying his features. He’d seemed worn down at dinner, but now he looked almost like his old self. A little pale, perhaps, but otherwise fine.

98.2379 percent John Sheppard.

ooooooooooooooooooo

She ducked the bantos rod swinging toward her head, countering it with a two-stick block before spinning around and sweeping her leg out. Ronon landed on his back with a grunt but rolled before she could bring her sticks down for the finishing shot. He popped back up to his feet, and she stepped back, swinging her sticks in her hands as she waited for his next attack.

“Sheppard okay?” Ronon asked suddenly, wiping at the sweat on his forehead with his sleeve.

Teyla flashed back to the night before. She’d spent hours in the infirmary and her back was still a little stiff from sitting in that chair for so long. John had slept for the first half of his treatment, but he’d been wracked with chills badly enough that it had woken him up and kept him awake for half the night again. No matter how many blankets they’d piled on him, he’d shivered and shook like he was half frozen in a winter storm, moaning about the cold. It was hours before he’d finally dropped off into an exhausted stupor.

“He is…fine,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. She was just… _rounding up_. Like both John and Carson had said, he wasn’t sick or mutating or anything of the sort. He was just finishing the process that everyone in the city had seen start and that Carson had miraculously deciphered how to reverse.

Ronon raised an eyebrow, a sure sign that he knew something more was going on. He made another lunge toward Teyla, this time to her other side. She parried it, though not quite as easily, and made a mental note to work on that side in the future.

“So these treatments he has to get…”

“He told you of those?”

A look of guilt flashed across the Satedan’s face. “Uh, not exactly. McKay kind of let it slip.” He swung his stick in a wide arc, stretching the muscles in his shoulders. “But he told you?”

“Not exactly. I ran into him just as he was about to undergo his first treatment after his release from the infirmary.”

“But he’s going to be okay?”

Teyla smiled, confident in her answer. “Yes, Ronon. Carson is just being careful.”

ooooooooooooooooooo

“He didn’t tell me, exactly,” Rodney said a week later. Teyla had spotted him in his lab hunched over his computer as she was passing by, and she’d flashed back to her conversation with Ronon. She’d stopped, deciding to ask Rodney how he’d known and whether he knew any more. Despite her presence during the last two treatments, John continued to ignore the fact that they were taking place at all.

“But you know of them?”

A look of guilt crossed his face, stamped out a moment later by the jut of his chin. “He’s our team leader, leading us into danger, making decisions that could put our lives on the line. It’s perfectly reasonable to check up on him and make sure all his faculties are there.”

She frowned, crossing her arms. She’d wondered at first if John had confided in Rodney, then decided the more likely scenario was Rodney badgering John into telling him. Rodney glanced down at his hands, then his keyboard, then back to Teyla’s face.

“Nobody told you about John’s treatment,” she said, realization dawning.

“Carson did!”

When Teyla continued to stare at him, he wilted and slumped down on his stool.

“Okay, fine—I hacked Carson’s files and read all his notes on the gene therapy and the treatment schedule. Satisfied?”

“Does John know you did this?”

Rodney’s eyes widened. “No! And don’t tell him. If he wanted us to know, he would have said something, but he just looked so tired and I thought maybe—”

Teyla held up her hands. “Rodney, I understand. You were merely concerned.”

He looked like he was about to protest, but he shrugged instead. “He told you?”

She shook her head. “No. I ran into him a number of weeks ago in the infirmary, right before one of his treatments was to start.” She stepped closer, leaning one hip on his desk. “You mentioned a schedule?”

Rodney’s eyes drifted back to his screen, but his gaze was distant. Teyla had seen the expression many times before, like he was reading the information back to her from an image he had pulled to the front of his mind, as clear as anything physical laid out in front of him.

“Every two weeks for now, but later they’ll go down to once a month until Carson’s satisfied the retrovirus won’t come back.”

 _Every two weeks._ That meant another week before his next treatment.

“Thank you, Rodney,” she said and she turned to leave.

“Let me know, you know—how he is and all that. Keep me updated…” he called out to her.

She glanced back at him with a smile and a wave. “Of course.”

ooooooooooooooooooo

It was easy to spot the signs, now that she knew what to look for. The department heads, Teyla knew, were in the middle of doing performance evaluations on their personnel, and Rodney had brought his with him to the mess hall that night. Once again, the four of them had met up for dinner, and John, Ronon and herself sat quietly eating as Rodney berated each name that came up on his list.

John was eating soup again, or more accurately, stirring it continuously. He wasn’t withdrawn, not completely, but he was quieter than normal. She saw Ronon shooting him worried glances, and even Rodney stopped mid-rant every few minutes to ask him a question and draw him a little more into the conversation. Eventually, John pushed his chair back and stood up.

“Been fun, kids, but duty calls.” He paused a moment, almost expecting one of them to ask where he was going or what he had to do so late in the evening, but when none of them said anything, he relaxed and smiled, nodded good night and left.

Ronon and Rodney exchanged a glance, then both of them turned to look at Teyla. The only time she had ever seen these two interact with each other, apart from missions, was during meals, but they seemed to have run into each other at other times—long enough at least to discuss John and his ongoing treatments. Ronon was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and Rodney pushed his computer tablet to the side.

“So, you’ll check on him?” the scientist asked. “According to Carson’s schedule, he’s got another treatment tonight.”

Teyla swallowed the last bite of her meal and pushed her chair back. “I will,” she said. She saw Ronon nod and sprawl back in his chair.

Rodney sat up straighter and twisted in his chair as he stretched his back. “Good,” he said, pulling his computer tablet into his lap again. “Keep us updated.”

She was halfway to the infirmary, lost in thought as she remembered John’s last treatment, when her mind flashed to a childhood memory of her father whispering her a story as she drifted off to sleep. Winters on Athos, especially at night, had been bone-chillingly cold, enough so that unlike in the summers, she’d looked forward to going to bed and had had a hard time dragging herself out of it in the mornings, preferring to lounge instead under the comforting warmth of the thick quilt that had once belonged to her mother.

The climate on Atlantis, even in the winter, was much milder than Athos’s weather had ever been, but she still had the blanket. It had been one of the few items she’d been able to salvage after the Wraith had razed her world. She turned, heading toward the nearest transporter, and walked quickly to her quarters.

Carson had learned how to keep John’s nausea under control, but he’d admitted there wasn’t much he could do for the chills that wracked him throughout each treatment. They’d piled on heated blankets the last time, but they’d done little to warm him. Her mother’s quilt was packed away deep in one of her closets, and she had no idea if it would help him or not, but it had kept her warm on Athos and she would at least offer it.

It took her a little longer to find than she had anticipated, so by the time she reached the infirmary, John was almost an hour into his treatment and already shaking. He was in the main infirmary bay this time, his bed cordoned off with privacy curtains, and Teyla remembered something about Major Lorne’s team picking up a contagious disease on their last mission and taking over the private rooms in the back.

“Hello, Teyla,” Carson said. A nurse emerged from behind the curtain, waved, and then said something about needing more blankets as she disappeared through a side door.

“I brought this, if it is alright,” she said, holding up the folded blanket. The material was thick enough that she could just barely look over its edge when she held it in front of her.

Carson waved her forward, and she slipped past the curtain into the relative privacy of John’s “room.” He was curled up on his side, his knees drawn to his chest, and shaking enough that the entire bed creaked and shuddered with him. His eyes were closed, but too tightly, and Teyla saw immediately that he was still wide awake.

His eyes snapped open as she approached, and he lifted his head off the pillow a second to see who was near him. “Hey,” he whispered, when his gaze settled on her. He dropped his head down and jerked under another spasm.

“Hello, John,” she said. She held out the blanket. “I brought this for you, if you’d like.”

“Yeah,” he answered, immediately.

She flipped it over the bed, covering him in one swift movement. The blanket was wide enough that she was able to fold it in half and still cover him completely. Once she had tucked in the edges around his shivering form, she pulled over the nearby chair and sat down.

“Better?” she asked.

John’s eyes had closed, but he peeled them open now and nodded his head. “Yeah, actually.”

He was still curled up in a ball and still shaking, but not quite as much. She glanced at the half-filled bags of IV fluids hanging above him, her eyes following the trail of plastic tubing down to where it disappeared under the blankets. There was so much of their world she did not understand, particularly when it came to medicine, but she was utterly convinced of Carson and his staff’s ability to pull lives back from the brink of death. Their level of skill was well beyond anything she had ever seen, and it was easy to forget they were still only human, still limited by their relatively vast knowledge.

“How are the treatments going?” she asked.

She barely caught the one-shoulder shrug under the blanket and a muffled, weary response that sounded something like, “Fine.”

“Will you have to undergo many more of these treatments?”

John uncurled a little and looked up at her. “Not sure,” he said. “Doc thinks we can go down to once a month after this, though.”

“That is good news,” Teyla said, and she smiled at John’s tired grin.

He’d returned to full active duty the week before, so it wasn’t like these gene therapy treatments were keeping him from his job or stopping him from doing the things he liked, but the sooner they were finished, the sooner she could stop worrying about him.

“I’m 99.667 percent John Sheppard,” he whispered, his voice gruff. “Almost there—one third of one percentage point to go.”

“Then I will not hold back any longer in our sparring sessions.”

“You’ve been holding back?” he asked, lifting his head again and sounding insulted.

She smiled. “I have been sparring at 98 percent full strength, but I will give you 100 percent from now on.”

“Well, 99 percent at least,” he muttered.

Teyla laughed, throwing her head back. “Very well, John. 99 percent.”

The nurse returned with more blankets, which John accepted, and Teyla helped her spread them over the top of the quilt. John’s trembling was minute and not quite the full-body shudders she’d seen him experience the last time. When they were finished, the nurse began checking his vitals and Teyla eased back into the chair. She had just barely sat back when she saw the nurse frown and lean forward.

“Colonel, is everything alright?”

Teyla glanced at John’s face and noticed immediately he’d become significantly paler in the last few minutes. His eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily through his mouth, but he jerked when the nurse patted his shoulder.

“Sorry, feel a little sick,” he mumbled.

“Doctor Beckett was expecting that. I’ll get you something for it right away—just hang tight.”

She disappeared around the privacy curtain, but Teyla could hear her nearby, retrieving whatever medicine she needed. John moaned, and the shaking intensified enough that the edge of the pile of blankets covering him slipped off his shoulder. Teyla stood, pulling the quilt and heated infirmary blankets up to his neck.

The nurse moved quickly, injecting the anti-nausea medication and hovering for a few minutes until John seemed to relax. When they were alone again, Teyla leaned forward, intent on asking him how he was. Instead, she sighed in relief when she saw he had fallen asleep.

ooooooooooooooooooo

She found the quilt folded up and sitting just outside the door of her quarters the next day, a scrawled thank-you note sitting on top. She glanced up and down the hallway, but there was no sign of John anywhere. She would have told him to just keep it until he was done with the treatments. She sighed, gathering the blanket and setting it on a chair just inside her door.

The treatments were reduced to once a month, which she’d found out from Rodney a few days later. John continued to refuse to talk about them, changing the subject the few times she had tried to bring it up with him, so it was almost easy to forget they were still happening, that John was still confronted by and dealing with the infection that had almost taken his life a few months before.

A few weeks later, Teyla returned to her quarters early, intent on catching up on some much needed rest after a particularly long and tiring day. It had been an easy mission, making contact with a group of farmers on a world of rolling green hills and sporadic clumps of trees, but it had involved many hours of walking. She could feel the fatigue in her calves and she stretched out under the covers, drifting off almost immediately.

She awoke abruptly, sitting upright in her bed and breathing hard. The room was considerably darker, but a glance at the clock on her nightstand told her that not that much time had actually passed. A little over an hour at the most. She was breathing heavily, her heart pounding in her chest as the last vestiges of the nightmare dissipated.

She had dreamed of the night John had escaped his room, attacked his security detail and Elizabeth, and raced through Atlantis on pure animal instinct. She saw again his lithe movements as he’d scampered inhumanly up the wall, then dropped down and taken out the entire security unit with her in the blink of an eye. She’d been terrified, not just that he would turn and attack her, but that she’d have to use her weapon on him. That she’d have to pull the trigger in a choice between her life or his.

She had come so close to killing him. That moment had haunted her for weeks, and every time she’d seen him in the infirmary, still covered in the rough blue mutated skin, the emotions would slam into her again.

A soft knock at her door jarred her out of her thoughts, and she realized that was the second time someone had tried to get her attention. The sound had pulled her from sleep the first time. She slipped quickly out of her bed and opened her door.

John was just turning away, and he started in surprise at the sudden hiss of her doors opening, his head snapping toward her. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you’d already gone to bed.”

He was dressed in black track pants and a t-shirt, and he rubbed at the back of his head with his right arm. She glanced automatically at his forearm, seeing the slight discoloration of the scar. It was almost gone, but not quite.

“There is no need to apologize,” she answered. “Did you need something?”

He bit his lip, hesitating, and she watched him shift awkwardly on his feet. “I don’t want to bother you at all,” he finally said. “I was just wondering if…um…if you’re not using it, then maybe…maybe I could…”

She blinked, her mind racing as she tried to figure out what he was asking her for. Before she could ask, she saw him grow still and straighten up, dropping his arm to his side.

“I was wondering if I could borrow your quilt again.”

Quilt. Treatment. How could she have forgotten?

“Of course,” she said. The blanket was still sitting on the chair next to her door, and she reached over, scooping it up and handing it to John. “Do you have another gene therapy treatment tonight?”

John grabbed the blanket, but at the question about the treatment, he froze. The muscles around his eyes pinched with tension, and he finally gave her a stiff nod.

“You should have told me,” Teyla said, tired suddenly of John’s persistent belief that he had to suffer through these evenings alone and that his team would somehow think less of him if they saw him sick in bed. As if they hadn’t spent hours with him already, through past illnesses and injuries.

John’s cheeks flushed red and he looked away, and Teyla wondered if he was irritated or embarrassed, or some combination of both. “I didn’t want you to feel obligated to sit there all night,” he sighed.

“But I am obligated,” she responded, satisfied when John stiffened in shock. _Good,_ she thought. _Perhaps now he will finally listen to what everyone around him has been saying._ “You are my friend, John, and your experience with the retrovirus affected myself—as well as everyone else around you—as much as it affected you. Our need to support you is as much for ourselves as it is for you.”

John bit his lip, his head dropping and his gaze locked on the blanket in his arms. His entire body was stiff and he said nothing for long enough that Teyla almost stepped back into her room and shut the door.

And then his body sagged, his muscles growing lax as he suddenly gave into the weight of the disease he’d tried to carry for so many months alone.

“John?”

He didn’t look up, just mumbled into the blanket still held tightly in his arms. “I hate these damn gene therapy treatments. Just thinking about them, what they do to me…” He shivered, and finally turned to look at her. “It’s stupid. I mean, they only last one night, and I’m back to feeling normal again within a day or two, but there’s always another one down the road. It’s never over.”

She stepped forward, reaching out to grab his arm. “It will not be long before you will be…” she trailed off. She’d wanted to say healed, but that wasn’t the word she was looking for. He was already healed, his strength recovered. Perhaps that was what made these treatments difficult—on every other day of the month he felt fine, but on this one evening he was reminded that it wasn’t over yet. That there was a possibility, no matter how slim, that it could happen again.

“Before I’m 100 percent John Sheppard?” he finished for her, the ghost of a smile brushing his lips.

She smiled back. “May I sit with you tonight?”

John sighed, shrugging his shoulder and looking slightly exasperated, but as they turned and walked down the hall, she saw his demeanor shift. By the time they’d reached the infirmary, he looked the most relaxed she’d ever seen him as he sat back on the infirmary bed and waited for the treatment to start.

ooooooooooooooooooo

He kept the blanket after that, and she sat with him through two more treatments as the percentage of retrovirus still in his system crept ever closer to zero. They set up new trade alliances and lost a couple of other ones to Wraith cullings. They found an Ancient outpost long abandoned with no working parts or retrievable data, much to Rodney’s disappointment. His dismay was somewhat assuaged a week later by the discovery of an Ancient warship and a crew of actual Ancients living in stasis.

They discovered that a weakness in Wraith technology existed, then found a Wraith trying to access information on the ship’s hyperdrive capabilities and were forced to destroy the warship and the approaching Wraith cruisers before finding out exactly what that weakness was. New fights and challenges, as well as Carson’s improving ability to manage the side effects of the gene therapy treatments, reduced John’s treatment experience to a minor distraction as more pressing matters occupied all of their time.

It was sometime after they were kidnapped by Ford and his group and forced to fight their way off the Wraith hive ship that John stepped through the time portal before any of them realized what it was. By the time he returned to Atlantis, six months had passed for him, and he’d missed the last of the scheduled gene therapy treatments. He’d returned to Atlantis with a full beard, agitated and tired and relieved all at once.

Teyla knew Carson was planning on keeping him overnight for observation, given the peculiar nature of his six-months-in-four-hours experience and despite his vocal protest that he was fine. When her door chime rang, interrupting her meditation, she was surprised to find John on the other side, dressed in casual clothes and holding her quilt.

He still looked a little lost and a little distant, but his smile crinkled the suntanned skin around his eyes. He’d shaved, and Teyla could see a line of paler skin where the beard had covered his jaw and chin.

He thrust the blanket out to her. “One hundred percent John Sheppard.”

“I have heard that before,” she said in mock seriousness, raising an eyebrow as she took the quilt from him. “You are not rounding up?”

“I promise—per Carson Beckett and his myriad of tests, not a single cell of the retrovirus is left in my system. But,” he said, tugging on his sleeve to reveal the undamaged skin of his forearm, “I already knew that.”

“That is good to hear, John. Very good.”

John nodded, then waved his hand toward the transporter at the far end of the hall. “Well, I should go before Beckett sends out the search squads. I’m supposed to spend the night in the infirmary for observation or something, just in case…I don’t know. In case of something.” He paused, then pointed at the blanket in Teyla’s hands. “I just wanted to…uh…to…let you know I was me again—no more gene therapy—and also to…say thank you, Teyla, for…you know…”

Teyla set the blanket to the side and stepped forward, grabbing his arm and turning it over gently in her hand. John froze, and she traced with her finger the smooth skin where the scar had once been. With a smile, she dropped his arm and gave him a quick hug, letting him go quickly before he had a chance to react or pull away.

“You are welcome. Good night, John.”

She stepped back and watched as John relaxed, the stiffness in his body suddenly uncoiling. He shot her a grin and spun on his heel, waving as he walked down the hall.

“No more holding back on me when we spar,” he called out as he reached the transporter at the end of the corridor. “I want 100 percent from you.”

“One hundred percent,” she returned, a sly grin sneaking across her own face. “You deserve nothing less.”

END


End file.
